Tag Archives: Social Media News

We already know that Facebook is the web’s biggest time sink. If you look at the average amount of time (according to Nielsen) users spend on the social network, Facebook is a clear winner over sites such as Google or Yahoo.

Now, according to comScore, Facebook is also first when it comes to the total amount of time users are spending on the site. In August, U.S. web users spent 41.1 million minutes on Facebook, which was about 9.9% of their entire web-surfing time in that month. In this same period, people spent 39.8 million minutes on all of Google’s sites, and those include another huge online timesink – YouTube.

comScore puts Yahoo in third place, with U.S. web users spending 37.7 million minutes on its sites, which was about 9.1% of their web surfing time in August.

The numbers are even more impressive when you consider that Facebook had just overtaken Yahoo in July, and in August last year U.S. web surfers had spent less than 5% of their online time on the social networking service.

Still, it hardly comes as a surprise: Facebook has been growing steadily in the last couple of years, and in July it announced it had more than 500 million active users.

If Facebook keeps growing, a year from now Google may find itself far behind Facebook when it comes to web users’ minutes. But does Facebook have room for growth? Mark Zuckerberg predicts the site’s userbase might even reach one billion. The number doesn’t sound too far-fetched, given that Facebook still has room for international growth — for example in China and Russia.

Of course, comScore only counts users from the U.S., so the global picture is still blurry. But the facts show that Facebook users spend a huge amount of time on the site, and it’s a worrying stat for Google. Google’s many online properties (Gmail, Search and YouTube, to name a few) have vast influence and reach. But right now, without a large social networking property (Orkut doesn’t count as serious competition to Facebook anymore), Google will have a hard time snatching users’ time from Facebook’s hands

The popular web-based RSS reader and news aggregator Bloglines will discontinue service on Friday, October 1. The Ask.com team that operates the site has essentially said that social media sites like Twitter and Facebook killed it.

RSS “pushes” website updates to readers around the world so they don’t have to find them through search or refreshing the site. It was a game changer when it evolved into popular use in 2005 — not coincidentally around the same time Ask.com acquired Bloglines from its founder Mark Fletcher — but social sites of all types from Twitter to StumbleUpon toDigg to Facebook have all but replaced it for most users.

While some users still follow their favorite websites on Facebook or Twitter, many people simply rely on their friends and other contacts to share and suggest interesting news on social networks.

“RSS aggregator usage has slowed significantly,” an Ask.com rep said in a blog post yesterday. “Bloglines isn’t the only service to feel the impact. The writing is on the wall. ”

Since Bloglines will remain operational until October, you have about three weeks to export your feeds to another RSS application such as Google Reader. The folks behind the scenes at Google Reader have added social features to that app to try and combat RSS’s reduced prominence.

Do you still use RSS, or do you rely mostly on social news sites and social networks now?

Rapportive makes an add-on for your Gmail inbox that instantly adds context to the people you e-mail, as you e-mail them. The Y Combinator startup demoed its social intelligence utility for Gmail at a Mountain View event on Tuesday.

Rapportive exists as a Firefox, Safari, Mailplane andChrome add-on for Gmail. Once installed, the section to the right of each e-mail message — typically occupied by Google ads — is replaced with rich information about the e-mail sender.

The add-on is a clean and lightweight way to get an instant glimpse at who the e-mail sender is and what his/her online footprint entails. Rapportive displays a photo for each contact, highlights professional information, includes links to various social profiles and even pulls in a few of the individual’s recent tweets, should the contact in question be a Twitter user.

As a Rapportive user, you can control exactly what your Rapportive profile shows to other Gmail users — perhaps the best motivation of all to download and install the utility.

With Rapportive, you can also add and save notes about contacts and install Raplets, which are third-party apps that add additional context or information to your contacts. The service even includes integration withTungle.me, so that users can check a contact’s schedules and organize a meeting without ever leaving the e-mail message.

Rapportive exists in a growing space of applications and services that aim to add social context and web intelligence to contacts in the e-mail inbox. Xobni is a similar tool specifically for Outlook users. Gist, which offers a full-featured cloud-based contact management service, also offers sophisticated social integrations and a Gmail Google Apps tool of its own.

To date, the early stage startup has raised upwards of $1 million in angel investments from notable names, including Paul Buchheit (Gmail creator) and Gary Vaynerchuk.

Google has acquired Ångströ, a service for delivering intelligent search results about a person’s professional network. It has also hired its founder, likely in an effort to build a legitimate competitor to Facebook.

“With the help of investors like CommerceNet and advisors such as Avery Lyford, our team shipped apps to discover hot new photos on Facebook, improve Caller ID by using LinkedInprofiles, adding style and links to Twitter, create a real-time social address book, and a slew of other services,” the company said in its farewell announcement.

Founder Dr. Rohit Khare has already joined the search giant, according to the Los Angeles Times. Before Ångströ, Khare founded KnowNow, an RSS service for the enterprise, and before that he was director of CommerceNet Labs.

Khare will be working on Google Me, the company’s still-unconfirmed social network. He will likely be working with Max Levchin, the former CEO of Slide, CTO of PayPal and Google’s newest VP of engineering, as well as Google VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra, who was reportedly instrumental in recruiting Khare.

Google has more riding on its upcoming social network than almost any other project in the company’s history. The search giant has failed multiple times to make inroads in social media, while Facebook is growing like wildfire. Google perceives Facebook as a major threat to the company’s dominance of the web. Khare’s arrival is yet another sign that the tech titan isn’t fooling around anymore when it comes to social.

A new study from Pew Internet found that between April 2009 and May 2010, social networking site usage grew 88% among Internet users aged 55-64, and the 65 and older group’s social networking presence grew 100% in the same time frame.

Young people still dominate social networks like Facebook, but their usage only grew 13% during the year covered by Pew’s report. Older adults are catching up at an incredibly quick pace, though it remains to be seen whether they will pass the youth or hit a ceiling at or below the usage levels reported by young adults and teens.

Older adults who use services like Twitter or Facebook are still in the minority amidst their peers. Pew reported about 10 months ago that 19% of all Internet users use status updates, but only one in ten Internet users aged 50 and older used status updates or read ones written by others. That’s a lot more than there used to be, but it’s still a small group — especially when you consider the fact that Pew’s numbers only cover people who are on the Internet at all. Many people in that age group aren’t going online to begin with.

According to report author Mary Madden, e-mail still dominates interpersonal communication for the 50 and older set.

So you paid attention to what everyone is saying and you created aFacebook Page for your business. You’ve got your press release links, photos and videos … but no one seems to care. What are you supposed to do now?

You’re on the right track, so congratulate yourself. A lot of small business owners don’t even bother to create a page — they’re simply not “on” Facebook.

But it’s all about where your customers and future customers hang out. And with people spending more than 700 billion minutes per month on this social networking site, it seems pretty apparent that your business needs to be hanging out there too.

Let’s review your Page. Go ahead, pull it up. Your Facebook Page should contain all or most of these:

Links to your blog posts

Links to related articles (whether they’re yours or not)

Videos

Photos

Discussions

This type of content is key in getting people to “Like” your page, and contributes to its overall success. And how do we define success? By getting people to interact and leave comments on your Facebook Page, as well as travel from the page to your company’s website and, of course, buying your product.

Facebook Pages Need Attention

If you neglect your Facebook Pages, they will die. If you use Facebook, you’ve probably stumbled upon a company’s page with no conversations going on and no recent posts. I’m guessing you didn’t click “Like” on that page. An unattended Facebook Page leaves a negative impression of the company — don’t let yours fall by the wayside.

The more you pay attention to your Page, the more positive results you’ll see. Cathy Nguyen, President ofLeatherandBags.com, has seen great results from her Facebook Page, but admits she could do more.

“Although I have a Facebook Page, I’m not utilizing it to its fullest potential because of time. I try to update when I can and should probably try to engage more often,” said Nguyen. “Utilizing Twitter, blogs and e-mails has worked, but then again, I’m not doing it frequently.”

People are used to passive marketing. In the old days, you could pay a magazine or billboard company to create an ad for you. Then you sat back and waited for sales to hopefully pour in. But those days are gone. Whether it’s you or someone else at your company, you need to dedicate someone to social media strategy.

Creating a Facebook Strategy

Maybe we put the cart before the horse in creating the Page without a clear-cut plan. That’s OK. Let’s develop a plan together. First, decide why you want a Facebook Page. Is it because everyone else is doing it? Or because you understand the value in connecting with customers who spend time socializing on Facebook?

Write down five goals for your Facebook Page. They might be:

Create awareness of our brand on Facebook

Get 10,000 “Likes” by year-end

Have at least 5 comments or shared items each week

Make Facebook one of the top 3 referrers of traffic to our site

Get 2,000 entries to our Facebook contest

Once you have these goals, break down the tasks required to achieve them. If you want 10,000 people to click “Like” on your page, you’re going to have to expand your contacts through your profile. Post your page link onTwitter, your blog, your e-mail and everywhere else. If you want interaction, you need to post insightful and thought-provoking questions and comments. Decide how regularly you need to post (I suggest at least 3 days a week).

Now determine who will handle these tasks. It might be one person or several. If it’s you, post the tasks to your calendar so you don’t forget to do them. In time, updating your Page will become second nature.

Ginger Anderson, who handles the Facebook Page for Scripps Health in San Diego says that when she started handling the page, all it did was push health news. Now the Page offers a mix of news, useful articles and videos that frequently get comments and questions from the 900 plus San Diegans who follow the brand.

“Our intention is to build relationships within the San Diego community (specifically with current patients and employees) and position Scripps as a trusted leader in healthcare,” said Anderson. “We receive the most comments on the posts that are general and applicable to a wider audience as opposed to disease-specific. We try to balance serious health news with fun, general health and wellness related content along with stuff about San Diego life (again, making sure it’s not always about us).”

Practical Tips

Just updating your Page won’t make it fabulous — that will take a little work from you. Here are a few tips to make your page more searchable and appealing.

Title: Some say the title is the most important part, so make sure your title is descriptive of your business and unique on Facebook.

FBML: Facebook Markup Language helps you create a custom landing page for your Facebook presence. If you want to promote a special event or direct attention to a particular product, this is a great way to do it. Don’t run screaming when I say that this code can make your page better. It’s not complicated, but if you don’t want to deal with it, hire someone to help.

Photos and Videos: Don’t underestimate the power of photos and videos. Even if you don’t sell products, you can still add photos to spice up your page. If you’re a dog groomer, take “Before and After” photos of those precious pet makeovers. A realtor can add photos of the houses on the market. A services firm can post pictures from the office to help visitors feel more connected to the staff.

For videos, why not shoot a tutorial on getting the most out of your products? An office tour? There are applications you can install within Facebook that will let you pull photos from places like Flickr. This can save you the trouble of uploading them in two places.

Questions: The jury’s still out on Facebook Questions, a recent addition to the site. But by asking questions through your Page, you can start discussions that will spread beyond just the people who follow your business.

Once you’ve put together your strategy and have worked on it a bit, give it three months. Then analyze your results and decide: Is Facebook helping your business?

Ben Huh, founder and CEO of the Cheezburger Network and meme mastermind, has offered to buy link-sharing site Reddit for an undisclosed sum.

After approaching a few Reddit staffers privately about his desire to acquire the struggling site, he made the offer publicly via The Daily What and then tweeted his intentions for all the world to read.

Reddit is currently owned by Condé Nast, publishers of print publications from tech-focused Wired to fashion rag Vogue. The sitewent freemium just last month after its staffers found themselves in financially dire straits — an odd circumstance given the stature of the parent company. At that time, Reddit’s admins had been given a fixed budget for the site, and their Condé Nast-imposed bottom line was not being met. After around 6,000 Reddit members donated, the site was deemed “saved.”

It’s that sense of community that’s inspired Huh to make a bid for the site. “I’ve tried before,” he wrote to us in a private Twitter exchange, “and been told a flat out ‘not for sale,’ hence the public version.”

In Huh’s public offer, he wrote:

I believe that Reddit is one of the best communities I have seen on the Internet. I also believe that Reddit would benefit from more resources and less corporate interference. We can offer all of the above. And we’d love to buy Reddit and all those pesky, troublesome users that we love so much.

Condé, we’ll be waiting for a call.

Reddit’s traffic profile and meme-surfacing abilities fit beautifully with the Cheezburger family, we have to admit. And if anyone knows about printing paper, financially speaking, based on memes and critical masses of web traffic, it’s Huh.

But after being turned down in the past, do you think Huh will make an impression on Condé Nast with his tweeted offer? Let us know what you think in the comments.

That’s the question we posed in this week’s Web Faceoff, our ongoing series comparing technology apps or ideas. We asked you which location-based service you preferred: Facebook Places or Foursquare?

This week’s winner: Foursquare! The contest wasn’t even close; with 57.11% of the vote (1,611 votes), Foursquare remained the king of geolocation. Facebook Places was able to muster 18.86% of the popular vote. Of our voting readers, 7.73% (218 votes) said it was a tie between the two, while 16.31% of you (460 votes) said that you preferred another location-based service.

Many of you pointed out that Facebook Places and Foursquare are likely to be used by different types of people for different purposes. “Facebook is going for the people who want to connect every part of their Facebook experience to a location, while Foursquare is going for a games-based market,” said commenter Anuj Ahooja. Others pointed out that while they preferred Foursquare, Facebook’s userbase of 500 million (and counting) will make tough competition for any startup.

What do you think this week’s poll results? How will the competition between the two companies play out? Let us know in the comments.

Just when I was about to give up hope of ever becoming mayor of Mashable HQ on Foursquare, the location-sharing social network has launched a new feature that might help alleviate my checkin fatigue: “am I mayor yet?”

According to the new feature, which launched this afternoon, I’m just four days away from becoming mayor of our New York City office. I know that because the service now tells you within the mobile app after each checkin (and with Mashable’s Brett Petersel on vacation, my dream might just come true).

In a blog post, Foursquare reminds us how mayorships work, writing that “you need to have checked in more days than anyone else over the last two months (60 days), so only one check-in per day counts.” Earlier this year, the service also introduced some new features to prevent so-called “gaming” of the mayorship system, an increasingly important issue as more brands begin to offer real world rewards for checkins.

Third-party developers had already built a number of apps – like “When Will I Be Mayor” – that do essentially the same thing that Foursquare has just integrated into its service. For those that care about the mayorship aspect of the game, bringing the functionality in-house should go a long way in keeping users engaged.

During the height of the crisis, four NYU students decided to create an open source alternative to Facebook. Their goal was to raise $10,000 for their summer project, but dramatic interest helped them raise over $100,000 through donations. Even Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated to the project.

Since then, the Diaspora team has been mostly silent, coding away on their project. However, in a blog postearlier today, they revealed that the project is on track for release on September 15.

“We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open sourced on September 15th,” the Diaspora team said in its announcement.

Only the Beginning

Diaspora was originally intended to be just a summer project, but the high interest in the project has changed the team’s plans. Diaspora’s development schedule has been extended.

“We aren’t going to stop working after we release,” Diaspora stated in its blog post. “Ilya and Raphael are taking leave from NYU, and we will continue to develop and maintain Diaspora as a long term project.”

What will Diaspora look like? According to the team, it’s focusing on “on building clear, contextual sharing.” One of the open source social network’s features will be making it easy and intuitive for users to decide what content gets added and shared to their social circles.

We’re looking forward to seeing the final product and trying it ourselves. What do you think of the Diaspora project?